


Bedstead

by reyleaux (witchoil)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Gen, Rating will change, Sharing a Bed, but not how you think!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2018-01-09
Packaged: 2019-02-17 11:06:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13075575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/witchoil/pseuds/reyleaux
Summary: The longer they try to ignore the bond, the more often it brings them together.A tight-to-canon post-TLJ piece about equal and opposite reactions. And bedsharing.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Still trying to process everything that's happened with/in TLJ, but here's my first effort. Part two coming soon, I promise!
> 
> Partially inspired by this amazing (and slightly fluffier) [art by kawaii-khwan-chan](https://kawaii-khwan-chan.tumblr.com/post/168705035592/good-morning) on tumblr! I couldn't stop thinking about it.

A warm finger of sunlight ghosted over Kylo Ren’s cheek in the moments before he woke. 

On instinct, his body went stiff.

Without moving or opening his eyes, he waited, let the silence of the bond fill the air with its oppressive edge. Nothing disturbed it but the rhythmic wave-crash of her breathing and the splintering, fractal sighs that echoed after.

_ So close _ , he thought, noting the nearness of the sound. Close enough that he could smell her in her sleep-clothes and her sheets. Tangy and warm and slightly floral, like underbrush and engine grease. 

He opened a single eye to find her still asleep. Cautiously, he turned his head on his pillow to drink the image in. She was planetside somewhere, bathed in the kind of warm light that he remembered clinging to her in their first conversations, but brighter. 

Still fire, but from afar. 

Her hair didn’t splay over the pillow, but curled under her head in uneven waves. Loops laying around her like the wires of a machine he could not understand. 

Beneath her lids, her eyes were still. So nearly awake, then. From her posture, Kylo Ren guessed that he had less than two minutes before she was awake and the silence between them grew cavernous and ugly again. 

This was not the first time. 

Watching his father’s dice disappear from between his fingers, Kylo had assumed that his last link to Rey had been severed, the tenuous thing connecting them slipping away as everything did with his rage and his inability to master it. 

Until, three days later, to their mutual horror, Rey and Kylo found themselves once again in each other’s quarters. Stripped down at the end of the day -- Rey’s hair loose and wet from a shower, Kylo Ren’s feet taken out of his boots -- they looked at one another in silence and stillness until the moment passed. 

What Kylo remembers best is the look on her face, angry but not enraged, still too soft around the edges. What Rey remembers is reflection of unseen lights, motionless in his eyes. 

The next time, her expression softened further. 

The third time, she let out a screech at his sudden appearance and threw a spanner through him, turning her back on him when it did not make him disappear.

Both times the lights remained. His gaze did not falter. 

Now, a month past, she looked right through him. He was still learning to look through her. 

But like this, in the mornings, it was harder. It was nearly impossible when he didn’t directly bear the weight of her indifference. So he allowed himself the luxury of the warm light and the smell of her hair. Just a moment more.

When she woke, he had already risen and dressed. She did the same in silence, remaining with him until halfway through brushing her teeth, eyes blankly trained on what Kylo guessed might be a shard of rusty mirror taken from the fresher of the  _ Falcon _ . 

He wondered idly if she could see him in it, pulling on his gloves behind her, still wearing the same cloak and tunic as before. 

Over the weeks, as the silence stretched between them, the bond seemed to stretch, too. 

On the first week, it was every other day. Then once per day, a little over a cycle apart. By the fourth week, they were edging on breaks of no more than twelve hours. Then eight.

So Rey disappeared as she brushed her teeth, but returned by 1300 with her feet up and a look of exhaustion on her face. Then again at 2036, tinkering with what Kylo could only assume was an access panel on the  _ Falcon _ . He allowed himself to notice the dipping lines at the backs of her arms, how they shifted as she worked intently, before returning his attention to the drone of Hux’s latest tirade. 

When she was there, all voices that weren’t hers took on a distant quality. An underwater film that left Kylo’s ears ringing as he tried to decipher it. It was so much easier to focus on her -- even at the edges, even if he wouldn’t allow himself to focus on her precisely. The aura of her presence shone brighter than every light on every terminal in every room. 

He was still learning to look through her like she could look through him. 

The next morning -- an endless-seeming string of mornings -- Kylo woke to the same silence and to the pure golden-brown of Rey’s eyes, trained flatly ahead. 

They didn’t even flicker when he met them, so cold and unaffected that he wondered for a moment if she could see him at all. 

It was slightly worse than the day before, and the day after would probably be slightly worse than that. It was the only certainty they shared: that this dilation would continue until it drove one or both of them entirely mad. 

And one day, it seemed to.

She looked to be backed up against a wall, sitting on the floor. 

Around 1700, it was her fifth visit of the day. Having only been apart for an hour at a time over the previous three days, the world itself was beginning to take on the garbled quality of a dream that never seemed to end. 

When Rey first opened her mouth to speak, Kylo was two weeks past even remembering to hope that it might be to him.

“I can’t,” she said to the space between her knees. “I can’t keep doing this.” 

Ben -- because that was who he was again, as it happened -- flushed hot with fear and shame. Perhaps he’d caught her in a private moment, talking with someone else. Perhaps she’d stopped even trying not to have those without him there. 

Perhaps she  _ didn’t _ actually see him anymore.

“I feel like I’m going insane.” 

Her eyes, liquid-hot with tears, fell on him like a brand. He knew because he could feel the sticking and the explosion of the cells below, could faintly smell again the char on his own face. 

“It’s nothing but us,” she said, “all the time. Just us. I hate it.” 

It took time to make his mouth move, to find the voice that she stirred up in him. It took time to work around those last three words and the razor they lodged in his throat. 

“What else is there?”

Rey’s head snapped up.

“What else?” Incredulity emanated from her. Disbelief and offense. “ _ Everything _ , Ben, there is  _ everything else _ .”

Rey gestured with her arms at the room around her.

Kylo Ren followed their lines, looking around the darkened entrance to his suite. Glossy black floors and charcoal grey durasteel walls. The occasional fleck of sterile silver. 

_ Everything _ , she said.

But no life here. No sunlight except for the diffuse glow on her face.

He ached about that, knowing somehow that she was right but unable to touch how. He reached down inside of himself, looking for the organ that held the ache, looking for the thing to say. 

All he found was that same underwater feeling, something muted, something mumbling. There were no words at all.

“Maybe for you,” he said. 

The planes of her face twisted, the smooth symmetry of her upper lip disappearing into a snarl. 

After months of her impassivity, Ben could have choked on her rage. Could have gorged himself on it ‘til sick and still come back for more. The only thing he liked better was her tenderness, but that was gone for him. Forever. 

“Get out!” she shouted, hand closing around a ball of wire and flinging it in Kylo’s direction. He felt it pass through him with a lurch of his stomach. Something else he could not identify sailed through the air. Rey yelled again, voice rising to a screech, “Get  _ out!” _

But he couldn’t get out, not even if he wanted to. 

So he stayed. And she screamed. 

They’d traded too much, he thought, as for once he played the impassive one and she destroyed a host of small machines. Each one flickered in and out of his view as she took it up in her hands and ruined it, not even using the Force to do it for her. They made him think of ships hovering around the Core worlds, all dropping from and jumping to hyperspace, flickering like stars. 

Then again, maybe they had shared too much from the beginning. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Good golly Ms. Molly. Sorry this took me so friggin' long. I'm juggling about 9 WIPs right now and though I was productive over break, I haven't had a great deal to show for it. 
> 
> As promised, here is part 2! Good news is it's a nice, long one. Bad news is the smut didn't make it in quite yet, so y'all will have to wait a little longer for that sweet, sweet ratings change. But I would bet heavily on the next chapter being pure (probably fluffy) PWP. ;) 
> 
> As it is, I hope you enjoy and a **massive** thanks to laureljupiter on tumblr for beta-ing this chapter! It wouldn't be the same without you.

Her outburst lasted two minutes before she collapsed to her knees on the floor. It was familiar enough to make Ben cringe; her panting breaths and quivering chin both the evidence that her desire for destruction had been sated and that it had not helped.

She balled her hands into fists and  _ refused _ to cry. The way she dammed it up made him feel sick, revolted at the pathetic display of someone so strong being reduced to a struggle against her own tears. A cold sweat of shame followed as he thought of what she must think of  _ him _ , then, his history and temper being what it was.

The feelings grappled and twisted within him as Rey tried to gather herself. He could see how controlled her gaze was, how she trapped it in the space just before her face, refusing to look at the damage she had caused. He recalled perfectly the way light reflected off of the floor of Snoke’s throne room, and the pattern of hairs-width scuffs that interrupted it below where he always knelt.

“I’m sorry,” he said, out of a sense of duty. He  _ was _ sorry, but not for anything he’d done. Just for her and her obvious struggle.

Aware of how hollow it sounded in his mouth, he regretted it instantly.

Rey placed her palms on the smooth, metal floor, but Ben could see something like dirt or dust stir around them as she did. “You  _ would _ take responsibility for the one thing that isn’t your fault.”

And he had to admit, it stung.

“You would think it doesn’t help, to lash out,” he said.

“But it does,” she answered.  _ Don’t act like you have something to teach me _ , her tone said.

“It’s ugly. Messy. Something a child would do.”

A memory flickered in him, small on the horizon but growing. It competed with images he could not push down of Snoke calling him the same thing, producing twin chimes of his master’s and mother’s voices. But it was there, as certain as Rey was there before him.

Something his mother would do on the rare days she had the time to. When she still came after his night terrors or calmed him after a tantrum.  

He shook as he lowered himself to a knee.

Skepticism wrote itself across Rey’s brows, but she had a look in her eyes that Ben knew from the mirror. Searching, wanting.

His heart pounded in his chest and his stomach flopped wildly, jarringly.

He hated this.

He really, really wanted to try.

“But we’re all children,” he said, “at some point.”

He didn’t believe it. But the way Rey’s expression softened when he said it made him wish that he did. He might try to, if she kept looking at him like that.

Not in pity, but recognition: she didn’t believe it either, but she wanted to as much as he did.

Ben raised a hand – nausea rising with it – to reach for her. His fingers traced the light around her, touching the air four inches from her head as gently as if it  _ were _ her head. Her eyes dropped from his momentarily, then flickered back up, and the action reminded him of that day on the  _ Supremacy _ .

She had done the same thing in the elevator as they rocketed towards Snoke’s throne room. Then he had thrown it away. So suddenly and suckingly empty, he couldn’t imagine how to fill the hole without glutting on destruction.

In this suspended moment, it occurred to Ben that he had never wanted the power, just the satisfaction of knowing his master had been right. He wanted the opportunity to abdicate the chaos of his own wants. He wanted relief from the horror he felt at being unyoked for the first time in his life and relief from the thing that looked back at that horror and felt sick. It was easier, in that moment, to be the thing his master had tried to make him.

But Rey. He had wanted Rey most of all. To be with her, but also to protect her from the black-hole-feeling that had planted itself in his gut the moment he chose her over Snoke.

He thought now that if he focused completely, he might be able to make himself believe that the order of things – the full elevator car, the empty throne – had been in reverse.

Hand drifting towards the back of her neck, cupping forward now to pull her into an embrace, Ben found that it was a possible feat.

Maybe he could reverse them.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, a shade closer to meaning it.

“Don’t lie to me when you know I can feel it, Ben.”

Electricity surged through him as the heel of his palm brushed against the hair at the back of Rey’s head.

Then a feeling like a pop, like the hiss of air releasing from a canister. The sudden clarity of emerging from underwater.

All at once, all over again, Rey was gone.

\--

Rey didn’t realize until the next morning that she had forgotten what the back wall of her bunk looked like without Kylo Ren lying in the way.

She felt her gaze icing over in preparation as she first woke up and turned, a skill in which she was now so accomplished that it took a moment for her to register that there was nothing there to look through.

Rey waited for the relief to flood in.

Instead, she felt her guts clench and curl all at once, like they’d been dropped back into her body after a long time of being kept elsewhere.

And regardless of how she did or didn’t feel about it, the change held.

On day one, he didn’t appear sulking across the kitchenette while she ate, nor half-consumed by the walls of the  _ Falcon’s _ cockpit when she checked the comms at midday. He did not show up in the corner of her room, sallow and silent and bathed in harsh, white light, before bed.

Waking alone the next morning to realize he  _ still  _ wasn’t there, Rey thought that the whole experience felt a lot like waking up from a very long dream into an ordinary world that no longer felt real.

She was on Qiilura with the entire remains of the old Resistance and a few new hands besides. She didn’t recognize any of the new faces, even though she knew she must have met them. She came to find that they were in the middle of negotiations with a collective of barq farmers, for reasons it took her all week to understand through a combination of inference and blind stumbling.

“Come on,” Finn joked on day five, “where have you been?”

Rey shook her head, smiling a little despite the sinking feeling that followed his words. “I don’t know,” she said, “somewhere else, sometimes.”

He came to a full stop, teasing tone abandoned. “I know, it hasn’t been easy on any of us.”

Finn looked her fully in the face and drew his brows together in that heart-breakingly generous way he had whenever he really stopped to look at her or Rose or Poe or Leia.

Without missing a beat, he explained, “The farmers hold some economic sway as producers of luxury goods. But they’re collectivized like the Rebellion, so politically they’re more interested in the future we offer them than in eking out a living under the Order.”

That’s right, they were calling themselves the Rebellion. Now. Again. Like the mysterious new faces, Rey couldn’t recall when she’d learned that, either.

But she learned it again, and other things besides. She got to know the new recruits: a mirialan woman named Shouula, a Coruscanti human called Tenree, a smattering of local near-human farmers, and a single, good-humored weequay.

Rey waited for the new stability of her life to go away, carried off to an echoing chamber that she couldn’t walk out of no matter how hard she tried. But after a week – after two – it never did.

Newly aware of the world around her, Rey accompanied Poe to meetings of the farming collective, sat quiet and attentive as he charmed and argued in turns. She tended to the  _ Falcon _ in her free time, even going so far as trying to teach Finn some basic maintenance. She watched Leia watching them all, following the gentle rise of her spirits through her posture and the flickers of amusement that crossed her face as Rose gazed after Finn when he wasn’t looking.  

Where before she followed packs of rebels zombielike into the mess, Rey now ate alone when possible. She didn’t need someone there to look at  _ instead of, _ just  _ at,  _ and only if she wanted.

So complete was her fearlessness, that by the second week she had become totally accustomed to sitting with her back to windows and doorways.

That same week, she disrobed without a towel held around her to protect her modesty.

By day seventeen, she started taking blind corners at high speeds and stopped checking exits entirely. She started doing everything she could to convince herself that she was in no way waiting for him –  _ Kylo Ren _ ,  _ you can’t be afraid of just his name _ – to reappear. In fear or otherwise.

_ You’re becoming free again, _ she told herself,  _ this is what freedom feels like. _

But even as she became accustomed again to dressing and eating alone, Rey found herself turning over in her bed in the morning in a strange ritual. She never opened her eyes while lying on her back. From that strange, dream-like time, she remembered: if she opened her eyes looking up and  _ then  _ looked over, he wouldn’t be there.

From this waking place on the other side of it, she couldn’t figure out why  _ that _ was the thing she kept recreating.

She had made the mistake of thinking about him too much before, she would not do it again.

Instead, she ran headlong into her days.

Rey tried harder not to sit silent through meetings. She tried to learn what was being talked about. Like Poe, she learned to memorize the price of barq and the names of the corporations that bought it most. She met with Shouula and the weequay, Tevis, to discuss community outreach and the slow building of other rebel cells in the system.

She thought about doing what Luke had shown her again -- that way of reaching out in the Force to feel the world around her. She picked up the ancient texts instead, when fear got the better of her.

When Finn asked her to take a shift in the kitchen while he took a communique to Poe in town, Rey offered to take it in his stead. Proactive at last, on day twenty-three.

“I know my way there, now,” she said, “let me bring it. I should have gone with him in the first place.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course, I wouldn’t offer if I weren’t.”

“Thank you, Rey,” Finn answered, and she could tell that he meant it. “You’re really starting to settle in, aren’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

Finn gave a funny smile. “You’re not ‘somewhere else’ anymore. You seem more at home now.”

Rey smiled in kind, warmed by his warmth. It felt good to hear someone say that, even if she didn’t believe it. At least something in her life was working.

“Good luck,” she said, taking the datapad from Finn’s outstretched hand. “Rose will need your help.”

She left in the falling dark, walking alone and without even a blaster on her hip, just a poncho over her shoulders and a telescoping baton fastened to her belt to keep the venomous gdans away. The ground crunched under the soles of her new, thicker-soled boots. Unfamiliar faces passed by, mixed in pleasantly with the faces of those becoming familiar with time.

Rey felt okay. She thought of how Finn had said she seemed home in this place.

There was a quietness to the world, even with the gentle rushing of wind through the fields. A silence which the sounds of farm equipment and livestock could not penetrate.

She wanted to like it. She really did. But a doubt persisted, a vague discomfort.

Maybe it was true that she felt at home here, but feeling at home also meant feeling alone. Coming up to the meeting-house -- with soft light and the sound of voices leaking out its windows -- Rey realized that “home” was not a place she always thought of warmly.

The meeting was long and cheerfully winding, and Rey enjoyed it right up until the very end.

Poe gestured to her to come meet him after the minutes had been run through. Rey assumed that he wanted the documents Finn had sent with her. Instead, he introduced her to the heads of the local council, arms sweeping in a modest gesture of presentation.

“Some of you may recognize Rey,” he said with a gentle nod in her direction. “She’s come into town a lot over the last few weeks.”

Rey faced them, a group of weathered-looking humans in homespun and synthleather where it could be spared. Some of them nodded, two reaching out their hands to shake hers.

“I mentioned that I would introduce you to someone special next time I was able. Well, this is her. Rey is more than just a member of the Rebellion.”

Instantly, a sweat prickled on Rey’s brow. She knew there was value in her status, but she wasn’t used to having it brought up like this. Really, she’d assumed these people already knew. She couldn’t decide if it was more shocking that they didn’t, or that this was how it was happening. 

“Rey is a great mechanic and a great pilot, but she’s more than that, too. Rey here,” Poe laid a hand gently on Rey’s outside shoulder and gave her a look, steady and fond, like someone immensely proud, “is the last Jedi.”

The heads of the council-members froze, all of their eyes going wide as saucers. Rey felt hollowed-out by their gazes. She momentarily wished for that barrier that used to separate her from them, the film that covered everything when— No, not now. Rey wracked her brain, trying to remember the last conversations she’d had with Poe. She remembered the ones about weather and barq from the last two weeks, the occasional check-in about the  _ Falcon _ , but anything before that got muddy. Unspecific. 

Poe gave Rey a friendly nudge in the belt and whispered, “Go ahead, show them the saber.”

Swallowing, Rey whispered back, “I can’t.”

This time Poe pulled back a little and turned his head towards her. His tone was soft, his gaze searching, encouraging. “That’s okay, Rey, these are allies. We can be honest with them.”

“No, it’s-- It’s still broken.”

Poe paused, the spell of the show-and-tell broken, a soft ‘oh’ of understanding forming in his mouth.

“And I don’t have it,” Rey admitted, offering her open palms to the hungry gazes of the council-members. “It’s back at our base. I don’t carry it with me,” she said, trying to explain it as quickly as she could by saying as little as possible. Every second that went by with all those wide eyes on her made her want to recede. She wished she was back on the road. She wished that fewer of those faces she had seen were familiar – wished instead that they were all strangers again.

“That’s okay,” Poe said, putting a little bit of space between them, voice lowered a little, still gentle. “It was my mistake.” 

Rey smiled anyways, making sure every council-member saw how good-natured she was, how of-the-people. “It’s not a problem. I’ll have to remember to bring it next time, I guess.”

“There’s no need,” Poe said, apologetic, not leaving her room to argue or apologize further.

The council-members looked a little disappointed, but Poe gracefully extricated them from the throng after handing over the holo pad and promising, with a charming smile, that he would give them any new reports he had later in the week. 

Rey was a little shaken, but grateful. 

“I’m sorry,” Poe said, raising an arm to scratch at the back of his head as they took the road back to the base. “About back there, with the council.”

Rey kicked a rock with her foot and shook her head. “It’s okay, really.”

Poe let out a deep breath. “It had been a long time since we talked about it. I got over-excited. I could have asked first.” 

“I’m not angry,” she said, “I just wasn’t expecting it. It’s alright.” 

“No.” 

He stopped walking and turned towards her, suddenly serious. “It matters, okay? You’re not just a toy to wave in people’s faces to get them to pay attention. You’re  _ the last Jedi _ . And that saber is an artifact. It’s basically sacred, probably even moreso to you than to me.” 

Rey swallowed hard, her brows knitting together. She felt hot and uncomfortable, like her skin was trying to pull away from her body. She looked away, to the ground. Felt her face going hot and red.  _ Sacred _ , she thought, unsure how she felt about that word. As far as she was concerned, the most important thing about the saber now was that she didn’t know how to fix it.

“Talking about it like it was town gossip-- I messed up.” Poe gave a weak smile, a supplicating gesture Rey did her best to return in kind. 

Fleetingly, she thought of the saber again, somehow both sacred  _ and _ broken and somehow neither of those. She remembered it suspended in the air, trembling between their hands as if on a string.

“It’s okay,” she said again, so close to meaning it, “there are worse ways to mess up.”

The next night, day twenty-four, Rey was beginning to relax in the relative peace after debriefing with Leia and Poe when something hiccupped. Some imperceptible shift in the air around Rey grabbed her attention as suddenly as a blaster shot.

Rey whipped her head around, unable to feel him but sure she was just rusty from lack of practice.

Then Leia cursed. She shuffled to a wall-mounted comm terminal.

“Command?” She called through, prompting a familiar voice to inquire about her status. “Nothing wrong with us,” Leia said, “but the air cycling is out again.”

Rey could neither help nor understand it, but almost instantly began to cry with a short grunt. Poe gave her a sideways glance and quietly excused himself from the room. “Give you some space,” he murmured to Rey as he stood.

Leia’s gaze flickered to Rey and back to Poe as he disappeared. She pursed her lips. “Don’t worry about him,” she said, “we all have those days, even if he doesn’t think he does.”

Rey wiped harshly at her eyes and nodded, the sting already fading back into a numbness she was becoming more accustomed to each day.  

“It doesn’t help, being able to feel like we do.”

Rey looked up to find Leia gazing at her in a soft, knowing way she often had with rising leaders. The look admitted her sympathy but betrayed no knowledge beyond that.

It gnawed at Rey, meeting Leia’s kind, even gaze. She should know, shouldn’t she?

“Yes,” Rey said, looking down into her hands. “But it’s hard... _ not  _ being able to feel, too.”

“Of course,” Leia added, patting her hand on Rey’s where they were clasped. “No amount of good Force sense can help us solve other people’s problems for them.”

And that was right, Rey thought, but it wasn’t what she meant. Her mouth went dry as she tried to imagine saying the words, tried to imagine looking into Leia’s eyes and admitting that she might hold the key to her greatest wish or the beginning of their collective downfall. She tried to imagine admitting that she was worried she’d lost that key for good and that it  _ hurt _ .

“Look,” Leia added conspiratorially, oblivious to the frustrated tears already building behind Rey’s eyes. “I know I’ve been a commander, but I also consider myself your friend, Rey. Who is it you’re trying to figure out? Finn? Please don’t tell me it’s Poe.” She left off with a gentle laugh, a lilting, creaking thing, well-used despite the dire times.

“No,” Rey said, “no it’s-- It’s Ben.”

“Oh,” Leia said, too quickly. It rushed out of her like a gasp. A lost cause she was still trying to put to bed. “No, honey, no need to put yourself down that path.”

“I’m not. I mean, I already did but I couldn’t-- It’s hard to say. It’s not hard to explain, but it’s hard to say.”

Leia let out another, “Oh,” and squeezed Rey’s hand again.

“We’re connected. Through the Force.”

“I know, Rey. It can be overwhelming.”

Rey shook her head. “No, we’re  _ connected _ , like two ends of a cord are connected.” She held up her hands, drawing them from a common center apart, two fingers on each hovering opposite the others. “It started on Ahch-To. We would see each other, suddenly  _ be _ there, with each other.”

Leia searched Rey’s face, trying to understand. Whether it was a matter of practical knowledge of the Force or a matter of wanting to know what it meant to Rey, she couldn’t tell. Nor could she answer either question.

“With him I felt— There’s always this place inside of me that’s empty, like a— a well. In the middle of me. And it never goes away, it just stays empty. But with him it was different, not really empty. As long as he was there, I felt less alone. I felt like I wasn’t alone at all. For the first time that I can remember.”

It stung Rey to say those words, as much as she could tell it stung Leia to hear. It was too much, too fast. She knew it was, but she couldn’t stop it. She’d been trying to stop all of it since it started and it had never kriffing  _ worked. _

They sat in silence, Rey unable to meet Leia’s eyes and Leia kind enough not to demand it. They let it sink in between them. Rey thought she saw one of Leia’s hands move up to her face in her periphery, but she couldn’t bring herself to check.

At last, Leia sighed. Her voice was thinner now, distant. “I’m sorry, Rey, but I have to ask you if it’s dangerous to us.”

“No,” Rey said, and it was funny but that was what did it. She finally broke down, letting out a sob. “No, I thought it would end after Snoke, but we still saw each other. On Crait. And then every single day after. Almost all day. Every hour. And I never spoke to him, Leia, I wouldn’t. Not after what he did. He was there but we pretended, together—” she stopped to draw in a breath, to try to gather her thoughts. “I never spoke to him until I couldn’t stand it anymore. And now it’s gone. He’s gone. And I thought I hated it when he was here with me, but I know I hate it now.”

Leia leaned over and took Rey in her arms. She squeezed hard.

Rey felt pathetic, but the embrace didn’t quell her emotion. It just told her somehow that it was  _ okay _ , encouraging it to flow free. Rey felt like she was leaking, bursting at the seams. Truth kept spilling from her like water from a sieve.

“I still feel so alone,” she said in a clogged, wet whisper, “even with everyone here, I feel alone without him. And that’s...broken. And I don’t know how to fix it.”

Heading to bed that night, Rey realized what she had been straining to hear in the debriefing room: the sudden stunning  _ stop _ that came before he appeared. That was why the air cycling had set her off. That was why the sound of the fields had still felt  _ quiet _ when she walked by them.

She had always thought of it as silence, but in its extended absence, she came realize there was a noise to it, too. A presence like wind in the room. Distinct from his presence. The thing that echoed. The thing that sang them close to each other.

And what a song it was, like the meandering light of morning, somehow winding its way through the corridors of the  _ Falcon _ despite there being no portholes or windows (barring the few spots here and there where the porgs won out against the hull faster than Chewie could patch it). A complex system of reflection and refraction that brought the sun in to her without her having to ask.

Rey bathed in that quiet, bolted away from the rest of the Rebellion in her tiny bunk, nestled into a wall. Still, she kept up her ritual: lying on her back and turning to her side with a slight exhalation before she opened her eyes.

And there, before her, her bed stretched out. Further than it was supposed to go, into a darker room the details of which remained fuzzy. And front and center: his sleeping face. The peace of it like a slap across the mouth.

Rey couldn’t help it. All of the practice she had ignoring him, looking through him as though he were even capable of being ignored -- it all amounted to nothing as she gasped loud enough to rouse him. His eyes flew open and Rey felt her breath catch. They were still half-asleep eyes, only half open. She wondered if  _ he  _ thought he was still asleep. Judging only by the bruise-colored crescents below his eyes, she could have guessed he wasn’t sleeping much. But with his emotions right there in front of her, too, written all over him like light wrote color onto cloth, also bruise-colored and tender, she knew for certain that he wasn’t.

His hand came up before hers did, reaching for her face then drawing back an inch short. She could see him  _ wanting _ , then suddenly remembering himself, trying to contain it.

Something in her lurched-- The well, suddenly full of water, suddenly spilling out.

She caught his hand in her own and pulled it back, pressing his uncovered palm to her cheek. It wasn’t the ghost of a feeling, like when they had brushed fingers on Ahch-To, a touch so light Rey doubted it would have felt different in the flesh at all.

No, like this he felt more like when they touched backs, palm to thigh, hip to hip. He felt solid. She thought -- despite herself and despite how sick she was of doing it -- that she might cry.

Ben ducked towards her, then away again, that same dance that said  _ I want to, but-- _

Rey leaned in for him,  _ enough buts _ .

They came close enough to kiss, bodies already following their mouths. Their knees touched, their chests close enough to feel the ghost of the other’s heartbeat in the air. Their breath mingled between them, heavy with sleep and some held-back feeling. Then a twin whisper:

“Ben.” 

“Rey.” 

They spoke simultaneously, so their lips brushed against each other, up and down, top lip to bottom lip, as they did.

Rey’s eyes went wide as Ben’s slipped down, looking into the space between them, bashful.

_ So that was it _ , Rey thought,  _ our first kiss. Just like that. _

But no, it was too fleeting -- too quick. She wanted more than that. She cupped the back of his head and pulled him in, intent on making the second one count. 


End file.
